Who is it you are?

Elqui 2, WIP, Detail
oil on canvas, 50x50cm

My inbox has been getting, aside the usual junk, a few anonymous emails. Some of them were comments made on the blog and I'll start with these.

Anonymous 1 commented on my 'Notes to future self' said that in order to know my future self it was crucial to know who I was now, and promptly recommended I'd buy a book - HIS book, I suppose. It struck me as an intriguing, if slightly off-kilter and possibly not very successful way of marketing one's publishing efforts. I should possible try the same.

But, anonymous had a point there and I'll come back to that later.

Shortly after, Anonymous 2 left a comment which slightly threw me. I got the first rant against my art in the commentary. It was intriguing too, intriguing for the fact that within 2 years it was indeed the first commentary left that thought the prints I showed were awful. I thought of my brother's joking how art commentaries tend to be of the nature 'oh, I think that's wonderful'. And my brother's right. Art blogs work very different from other, notably political blog that the people who usually do radio phone-ins or write angry letters to the editor don't really participate.

That point was made even clearer when I was reading - in the newspaper - about the death threats and all assorted violence directed at a feminist blogger in the US. She poignantly stated: 'These are only ever left by that unknown angry entity that is 'anonymous'. Funny that, isn't it?

There is such power in remaining anonymous.

So, I was thinking of these two comments when earlier this week I received a password and login details for one of those business sites where recruitment panels send job applicants to for psychometric testing. The anonymous email stated 'if you have any questions about this test, please contact your administrator who initiated this email'. In the Notes from Administrator section there were no notes.

It left me wondering who at my work place - and it was clearly initiated form my workplace wants to know who I am? Whether I'm extrovert, intuitive, thinking and perceiving, or the opposite. I wondered if it had anything to do with the redundancy procedure notice I received recently, or with a new tutoring job I applied for, or, or, or...

Curious me left the email untouched but did a bit of Myers-Briggs personality testing anyways. I find them curious, a bit more reliable than horoscopes, I suppose. And fascinating how much of personel management builds on these 16 types. So, even curioser I wondered if people were all equally distributed across those 16 types. Of course they aren't. And I grinned that I end up in one of the rarest category. How funny is that. Now I need to find something about the prevalence of certain types in academia. I think I can have a good guess. :)

So are we anonymous or one of 16? That's not really a binary question, is it? It's a bit similar to the following: how many possibilities are there in a limited palette?